ChordAIS: An assistive system for the generation of chord progressions with an artificial immune system

Abstract Chord progressions play an important role in Western tonal music. For a novice composer, the creation of chord progressions can be challenging because it involves many subjective factors, such as the musical context, personal preference and aesthetic choices. This work proposes ChordAIS, an interactive system that assists the user in generating chord progressions by iteratively adding new chords. At each iteration a search for the next candidate chord is performed in the Tonal Interval Space (TIS), where distances capture perceptual features of pitch configurations on different levels, such as musical notes, chords, and scales. We use an artificial immune system (AIS) called opt-aiNet to search for candidate chords by optimizing an objective function that encodes desirable musical properties of chord progressions as distances in the TIS. Opt-aiNet is capable of finding multiple optima of multi-modal functions simultaneously, resulting in multiple good-quality candidate chords which can be added to the progression by the user. To validate ChordAIS, we performed different experiments and a listening test to evaluate the perceptual quality of the candidate chords proposed by ChordAIS. Most listeners rated the chords proposed by ChordAIS as better candidates for progressions than the chords discarded by ChordAIS. Then, we compared ChordAIS with two similar systems, ConChord and ChordGA, which uses a standard GA instead of opt-aiNet. A user test showed that ChordAIS was preferred over ChordGA and Conchord. According to the results, ChordAIS was deemed capable of assisting the users in the generation of tonal chord progressions by proposing good-quality candidates in all the keys tested.